TEI Ryo Shi Kyo
Born: 26 June 1880 – Died: 6 July 1942
Particulars:
Ryo Shi Kyo was born in Tainan in Taiwan. She was a widow living in Djokjakarta in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. When the Pacific War broke out, she was taken to Australia with her 34-year-old son Shun, who was a biscuit factory employee in Djokjakarta. They were interned together at Tatura Internment Camp in Victoria. Four months later, she was admitted to Waranga Hospital and died several weeks later at the age of 62. Her grave is in the Japanese Cemetery in Cowra, New South Wales, Australia.
–Mayu Kanamori
More info:
Sophie Shao-Yu Leu
Artist/s Statement:
This work traces the life of Tei Ryo Shi Kyo, a Taiwanese woman carried across empires, interned during World War II, and laid to rest in the Japanese Cemetery in Cowra. Born in Tainan in 1880, she laboured as a biscuit factory worker in Djokjakarta, mothering amidst the violences of colonial rule. Detained as a ‘Japanese’ internee, she died in custody in 1942. Her story, entangled in displacement, colonial subjecthood, and silenced womanhood, reveals the fragile threads of empire and war. Through paper sculptures crafted with repeated gestures and photographs shaped by layered digital filters, this work becomes an act of re-weaving memory. It seeks to summon the lost resonance of her Taiwanese name, effaced by colonial records and historical forgetting. In its layering of textures, forms, and time, the piece becomes both memorial and feminist reckoning, insisting on the dignity of the erased and the unfinished work of remembrance.
Artist Bio:
Sophie Shao-Yu Leu is a Taiwanese illustrator and interdisciplinary researcher whose work moves at the confluence of art, memory, and feminist thought. Based in Taipei, Taiwan, she weaves personal narrative, collective history, and everyday textures into visual forms that invite reflection, dialogue, and quiet acts of resistance. Trained in visual arts and humanities education, Sophie works across traditional and digital media, blending illustrative tenderness with research driven inquiry. Her projects often explore themes of care, resilience, and the gendered body, asking how art can become both testimony and bridge. Through exhibitions, educational programs, and collaborative practices, she fosters inclusive spaces where critical and affective knowledge meet. Her ongoing explorations imagine illustration as a feminist pedagogy – an embodied method for nurturing relational ties, restoring erased stories, and making knowledge feel-able within and beyond institutional frames.